


Siempre

by theoceanpath



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 11:16:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21409300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoceanpath/pseuds/theoceanpath
Summary: [Forever]This is the way it always was,The rituals of timezones and score sheets between usYou burn your words into revolutionsAnd under your flag, I pirouette
Relationships: Javier Fernández & Yuzuru Hanyu
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

"I just miss Javi," Yuzu says, like butterflies do, because those tiny winged things have not lived long enough to speak of forever.

The world stops for a moment. The countries fly apart.

His coach smiles, seven rainbow years in the making, three Olympic golds and one bronze shining in his cheeks, his forehead creased in a three-step terrace leading to silver medal stained hair.

"He'll be back. Don't worry." The older man lays a hand on his shoulder and it is not big enough to cover five feet and a half of empty space.

Yuzu's eyes let go of the flag. There's not much time left before Rostelecom; he's got an axel combo to work on and the last thing he needs is a distraction in the form of bands of sunshine and red carnations and the lonely strand of frayed thread that he longs to wind around his finger. He drags himself back to rejoin the others, hoping choctaws and mohawks and three-turns will be enough to drive away the uneasy thickness in his chest. But the black hole at his side remains unoccupied, and the chorus of scrip-scrapes under his feet sound eerily similar to falling glass.

* * *

He sets three world records and wins gold at his first Grand Prix competition.

The next assignment secures him another win, another record, and another useless ticket to the finals.

* * *

On the night of the ruined free program, he hears a song in his dreams.

_Je suis malade_, the voice cries, _parfaitement malade_. He's sick of it, sick of himself, sick of his ankle.

_Je suis malade_, the chorus repeats, again and again, again and again. The music plays on like shipwrecks and car crashes. It's immortal now.

He laughs, because years are crippled beings and he cannot patch up memories with metal needles. He's tried it before – superglue, duct tape, staples, epoxy; he ripped the ribbons of all his medals to threads and dyed and sewed them into a canvas he could not write upon.

"It should have been magnificent," he tells the press when they inquire about his condition. "I wanted to skate a proper tribute today."

They point out that he is mortal after all.

He chokes back tears and reminds himself that birds can't fly when they're shedding feathers. He'll be back, and he _will_ soar.

Hopefully in time for Worlds.

* * *

The days march on with the giddiness of oysters. He rewatches _Romeo and Juliet_ in all its versions. _The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The Phantom of the Opera_. He even finishes the sequel.

_Come to Spain,_ Javi invites him, at the exact moment he can no longer move his right foot. We're having _jamón serrano y queso manchego_ for dinner.

It's one of those moments Yuzu wishes he could just unzip the air and reel in someone from the other side of the planet. After all, men have walked on the moon and little girls do somersaults and land on four millimeter blades on one of the slipperiest surfaces on earth; who says he can't make this simple wish come true?

Like who says quints are impossible?

And who says a full recovery after one week can't be done?

(His ankle does. Maybe his ankle is mad at him.)

_Come to Japan_, he types. Which they both know is equally futile. Olympics has changed things, for better or for worse, and a last minute flight adjustment is not on either's list of things to do.

_Wanna meet halfway?_ Javi proposes, as if he doesn't have a show scheduled in a few hours. _We could always take a little vacation in the Antarctic. Heard they've got unlimited rink time there._

For a brief, sputtering moment, Yuzu doesn't think about getting back on the ice. His mind drifts to leopard seals and killer whales and how they could erase everything and schedule a rendezvous in the _Sahara Desert_ and he would still be overjoyed to see Javi again. And he wonders, not for the first time, how something as big as loneliness could squeeze itself into the infinitesimal lump of a human heart.

He's deliberating whether or not to google _world's top ten fastest airplanes_ when another text bubble appears on the screen.

_So? Are you coming?_

_Only if you dress up as a penguin next._

_Sounds great! _

_Except I'd have to waddle on skates _

_and Brian's gonna worry about my _

_vanishing skating skills, _

_so I think I'll pass for now._

_Ehhh … but Javi, it would have been perfect for Europeans. You still don't have a new program, right?_

(Come back to Canada, he doesn't say.)

(We're still waiting for you.)

(What's taking you so long?)

(_Javi_…)

Backspace. Backspace. Delete.

_How's your cat?_

_You mean Effie? _

_Oh, Plushenko adopted her._

_Javi. You wouldn't._

A pause.

_You wish you were here, don't you?_

_I wish I were anywhere else._

The next message takes a few minutes. Maybe Javi is a mind reader now. Maybe he can sense how many unspoken _I-miss-yous _linger behind those words.

Or maybe, _maybe_, in the rush of things he's forgotten all about practice and training and is actually planning to do a mini comedy show instead when he shows up in Minsk.

He sighs.

Javi will be Javi and poor Brian will never not shake his head.

_Hey, I forgot to ask but _

_which of my new costumes_

_ do you like best?_

_The one with pincers, of course_. _It suits Javi. I want to see you do a Salchow in that._

The reply he gets is a picture of a very unamused cat with the caption, "Seafoods don't spin in the air; they're too busy lurking in my stomach."

Javi signs off afterward. Yuzu exits the app, sets his playlist on shuffle, and burrows into his pillow.

* * *

His birthday comes and goes. He skips the Grand Prix Finals. He skips Nationals. He falls in love with the ice all over again.

For the first few weeks, he goes slow. Recovery is a bridge nailed together with a million baby steps and painted with frustration. He could have been training quad axels by now, if not for this. He could have made the ultimate tribute and Plushenko would have been so proud.

But pain lingers like missing people, like the second hand of a broken clock, and sometimes he just wants to freeze himself into a snowman and run away with the first screams of summer. And as the Cricket Club and the JSF and the names of all those ISU judges fade away from his consciousness, he'll dance among the cherry fields until there's nothing left but memories of the sun and the ice and the wilderness of sky he shares with Europe and Canada and everywhere between.

_Will you miss me too, when I'm gone?_

The walls remain silent, acknowledging his inquiry by the twinkle of gold plaques bearing his name.

TCC will not forget.

He glides towards the edge of the rink and finds a green stuffed toy cricket watching him with sad button eyes and string bean legs, curled up where one of the kids abandoned it on the bench. Putting on his blade protectors, he steps away from the ice, tissue box in tow, and gives Blade a fond pat on the head.

_You miss Javi too, don't you?_

The cricket plushie stares on, unmoved by the cracks in his voice.

It wasn't supposed to be this hard.

And it's not just Javi. He misses everyone, so many, many people from Japan to Russia to the ends of the earth. He misses home. He misses his rink. He misses how he could hang out during competitions without needing bodyguards to save him from the mobs. He misses his old life, his classmates, the places he would visit, the days untainted by disaster.

He bends down to touch the ice again, letting his fingers trace lazy patterns on the crosshair scratches.

_I hope you know how much I gave up for you._

_Thanks for everything you gave me, too._

He gets up and starts taking off the blade covers, readying himself for another round of practice. He reaches for his tissue box when it dawns on him that Pooh-san is lonely too.

He gently picks up the green cricket and sets it next to Pooh.

_There. Much better._

His blades flow into the step sequence, cautious yet sure, trusting his ankles to take him around the ice like they took him around the world. From the distance, he can almost hear Blade-san and Pooh-san cheering him on.

Soon he'll get his quads back. He'll skate _Origin_ so well and make the TCC bell ring. And then he'll master that axel.

Springtime is coming, he knows, and rushes toward it.

Like butterflies do.


	2. Chapter 2

"Shoma was in sneakers, too," a club mate points out when Nationals is over. "What's with you guys and winning gold with ankle injuries?"

Yuzu flashes a set of tamed, dragon-white teeth.

He doesn't tell him that it's in their nature, that Japan's existence is tied to ash and cinders, that every ridge on the islands' backs rose out of the birth pains of rumbling earth and lava-sullied ocean. And it would be an insult to the ancient code of honor if the current incarnation of swordsmen on ice could not summon the strength to press on.

_We survived the war. We endure, like the peach tree through a hundred winters. Like the star lovers whose paths only meet once a year._

"Mount Fuji didn't reach its height by backing down," he replies.

He does a spread eagle-delayed axel-twizzle sequence before Ghislain calls him over to discuss the latest footage of his single loop.

It is five days until New Year's Eve.

* * *

"I didn't win Nationals," Zhenya confides to him in hushed tones worthy of the darkest secrets.

"I didn't either," he whispers back.

"But we'll win next time, won't we?" she quips, nineteen years old, a soldier. There is strength in the playful curve of her lips, an optimism founded on steely resolve and shared demons and the familiarity of those who once stood on top of the world together. Not many in the Cricket Club can grasp the desperation of being just one in a hundred faces, a single piece among a million gears fighting against the clock. He knows this color, too.

He hears her pain, hears the thrum of scars reopening from the dirt track course of not being your country's sole hope, and offers the only consolation he can give: the sound of his blades, the sound of his cheers, the sound of his laughter. Too much is at stake in this brotherhood of sprained ankles and broken backs and dislocated shoulders, but she has grit and fire and she will thrive, somehow.

He adorns her hair with shaved ice.

Zhenya _squeals_.

Her shrieks call the attention of the others in the rink, and moments later Jason's blades skid to a stop in front of them, showering Yuzu's boots with temporary constellations.

"Hey, what's going on? You guys mocking my amazing quints, huh?"

Yuzu blinks. It was not a quint, it was not a quad. It wasn't even a triple. He's about to ask what exactly Jason put in his morning coffee but Zhenya beats him to the punch.

"You wish! You haven't even done a—"

"Shhhshhh! Excuse me, young lady, I don't know where you've been all this time, but I've been doing perfect quint _spins_ since I was a teenager!"

"Oh yeah? Well, let's see if you can do twenty revolutions without falling on the ice!"

"Make that thirty!"

"Forty! Do forty!"

"Go Jason!" Yuzu cheers, as the other throws out a five and a zero with gloveless hands and proceeds to transform into a human wind turbine.

It is four days until New Year's Eve.

* * *

He lies with the stillness of feigned sleep as rapid chirping spills through the pagoda-styled window. Night has not been kind to him, and so he sits up in bed bundled up in fleece blankets and lifts half-lidded eyes to the heavens. He watches the sky scrape itself clean, watches the stars erase themselves and the blue gently fill in the gaps. He feels the microscopic ice showers tumble back to where they came from while the universe remembers its colors in perfect saturation and hue.

More than anything, cold means that you need someone. He snuggles deeper into Pooh, who hugs him back with the combined strength of worn out threads and cotton tufts threatening to fall off its paw.

The alarm rings.

His Macbook greets him with video clips of the queen surrounded by her knight and ladies in waiting. Plushenko is there, and if not for his cursed foot he, too, could be hiding somewhere in the crowd.

The _Revolution_ was, by all accounts, a monumental success. There has never been an ice show this grand in Spanish history, and it's all thanks to the perseverance of one man.

One man scheduled to arrive in a few days for his last weeks of training before he takes a final bow at Europeans next month.

A part of him is excited.

A part of him dreads it.

And a part of him stubbornly clings to the hope that he'll stay. TCC without Javi is like Sendai without trees. It's…different. _Wrong_.

The years are warm and cold between them, engraved with the frustration of stellar practices and ruined free programs, trading fistbumps on podiums like there was no other place to be, world titles and exaggerated bows and scores climbing higher than they've ever been.

_Don't take him back_, he begs the flag on the wall.

But Don Quixote is done with adventuring. He is going home.

_Wait_, he pleads, as he does a jumpless run-through of Otonal. _Don't make me close the photo album yet._

At the very least he could leave a souvenir — something more solid than etchings on the rink, or a name in gold lettering, or a pouty-faced green stuffed toy that won't talk even if he crashes.

_Javi has moved on_, Brian said in the latest interview.

So does that mean Yuzu is stuck?

He braves another round of muscle strengthening, and wonders. He has always known that time flows differently for them. Skaters are but walking music boxes, little wind-up toys with melodies brief as summer fireflies. Faces exiled to the other side of the rink, boots that no longer touch competition ice. But it's hitting hard, very, very hard; it's as though the Olympics broke the clasp on time. The clock is ticking again, and he is suddenly older now.

Yet the battle isn't over — at least, not for him. He's still getting his jumps back. He's still figuring out that axel.

_Just a little more, please_. Unbreak his joints. Patch up his bones. Stitch every tear in muscle back together with the gold thread of his costumes. Let him finish all his goals. And then time can restart for him, for them.

Rocker, 3-turn_. Swish, swoosh, _the unsilences of the ice.

_I quit_, he remembers Javi saying more than a handful of times in class._ I quit. I'm outta here._

But he came back every time, a slave to the ice like all of them are.

He will come back. Of course he will.

_Won't he?_

It is three days until New Year's Eve, and the Cricket Club is too silent.

* * *

Practice commences with the strains of _Haru Yo Koi_ filtering through his ears. He loses himself in the music, letting the ice turn to sky as his feet lift off on silver-laced cloud carpets.

He can feel the feathers sprouting from his shoulder blades. He pushes harder, reconstructing the ligaments, coloring them in, stretching out each wing fragment from quill to tip. He is the fireworks on the brink of splattering, the falcon piercing through wilderness currents, the geysers hurtling towards the sun—

A stab of pain shoots up his leg, splitting his skies, binding his feathers in tar slick, painting the ground solid again. The vision fades; he is just an injured boy on the ice with the wind booing at his hair for company.

Question: How do you repair torn ligaments?

Answer: You wait.

Question: How do you speed up time?

Answer: Make the Earth revolve faster.

Question: How do you upgrade a planet's rotation to maximum velocity?

Answer # 1: You can't

Answer #2: You _can't_.

Why won't his ankle just heal already? Forget the records, forget the programs, forget the quads. He just wants to skate, for goodness sake. Why does his body have to be so weak? Why—

_The greatest lights cast the most shadows_, his father once said. _This is the essence of solitude._

But. It's one thing to be left behind, another to be stuck.

It's the feeling of stopping by magazine stands hoping your favorite manga has updated and seeing the same old volumes again. It's curling up in an evacuation center praying for the shaking to stop and the waves to return to the farthest depths of the sea.

It's the worst.

_I wish the mirror would dance with me._

_I wish the ice could speak._

Maybe he has too many wishes.

Here, in this catatonic frost-glass world, there is no forward, no backward. Only circles. There is no sand; the slippery roads leave no footprints, and he cannot find his way home.

It is two days until New Year's Eve.

* * *

_Wait for me_

_Sings the boy trapped in the wind_

_It's lonely on top;_

_The battered songbird thrusts its throat, gasping_

_To an audience thousands of miles away—_

_Come spring,_

_Upon the charred forests_

_Come find me…_

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve.

* * *

It's cold tonight. Fire colors paint the sky into a midnight wonderland reminiscent of evanescing snowflakes, and he resigns himself to waiting.

He'll take it slow for a few months. Health before quads this time. And then he'll rise up like a firebird erupting from a smoldering crater, wings stained in black ash and lighting branding its veins, tearing apart the subterranean vents shackling down its claws, sparking, screaming, conquering, like a—

_Roast turkey._

"Come on, Yuzu. Dig in," says Tracy.

_Greatest bird in history,_ Brian claims. He has Spanish grapes and rice cakes on his plate. They go together about as well as the clash of cultures they represent.

"Remember, no general wins battles on an empty stomach."

It's New Year's Eve, and Yuzu's life is a stained glass window an hour away from blowing up.

* * *

Today is the first of January. Yuzuru Hanyu is making a mosaic of his life in countries, in airplane rides, in five-digit scores, injuries and lessons learned.

He puts in the monochrome pieces first.

There is fame in all its white-hot angles: people hanging posters of him in their rooms, his face haunting train stations long after he has left the country.

Purple, for not quite goodbyes, not quite hellos. Things that intensive training can't help you forget.

The warmth of friendship in yuzu-orange tones.

Red and blue, red and blue. Fire on water.

Little bits of green, the remnants of old skin clinging to the caterpillar. The creamy brown of the Cricket Club walls, warm and cozy like a quaint wood brick cabin in the forest.

Gray. Smoke and midday glare and the color of nostalgia.

His hands are overflowing now.

_I can still see it. All of us, all those pieces._

He slashes his pinkie across the border. It bleeds.

His fingers fly back and forth, spilling questions and lost chances and secret fears in little red strings. How many steps fill up a rink? How many Ina Bauers? Does anyone know? Will anyone count for him? He misses Nam sometimes. Javi's plane lands tomorrow. He won't be seeing Kikuchi-san for months. His father—

The picture is too big. It's going to explode.

The only way to conquer ice, he once thought, is to be a flame. And now…now…

_What are you doing this for?_

_Quad Axel. Quad Axel._

No.

He's doing this because…because he wants to skate. Because in the end it's just him and the ice, and Pooh. And the Yuzuru Hanyu now is not the Yuzuru Hanyu of before; there are too many people and too many countries in that name, and his ankle can't possibly carry them all. He doesn't want to retire yet because he's finally happy now, but he doesn't know how much longer now will last, and he is getting older, and his body more broken, and his dreams have gobbled up all his strength, and he has to prepare for Worlds…

"Yuzu," Tracy calls to him, the voice of a mother swan through the hundred-year storm. The sound of home.

"Come skate with me?"

The chrysalis breaks.

* * *

Someone is coming, and for the first time, he is not counting days until goodbye.

Perhaps he should rehearse this. It ought to be more memorable. Something better than the rushed "_See you soon_" and "_Bye-bye_" while packing up after Fantasy on Ice. Something…

"¡Hola!" a familiar voice slithers into the rink, earning a frantic rush of blades and whoops of joy from those present.

To Yuzu it sounds like, "Tadaima."

He takes a deep breath, scattering the months, the hours, the seconds — all the worries and all the waiting, like a full-fledged Onmyouji. It doesn't matter how many gaps in the puzzle he needs to hunt down, or how little time he has left. He has this moment, this today.

"Okaerinasai," he says, and glides into Javier's arms for a hug.


	3. Chapter 3

This song plays backwards.

Dreams have a half-life of approximately one hundred years and there are 990 origami cranes hiding in Yuzuru's apartment on the day of the men's free program. A battalion of gold and red sentinels lies on his bed, all sharp angles, wastebasket filled to the brim with rejects. He is only ten pieces away from his goal when his alarm rings, but his fingers are too numb to go on.

Ten more sheets of construction paper; his final gift to a friend.

_Eight more_. His eyelids sag with the impossibility of sleep.

_Six_. One for every year of retracing each other's footsteps on the rink.

The final bird is scarlet— bloody dazzling red as autumn flowers that bloom on the path where dearest companions part ways forever. He carefully folds the last crease and sets it on his pillow.

A thousand birds for a single wish, they say. If Javi wins this, a record will be tied. And his blades will never touch competitive ice again.

Yuzuru's eyes are clear, and dry.

As of this minute, Javier Fernandez has not officially retired yet.

* * *

When the Olympic Channel asks him for a short farewell message to include in their tribute, Yuzuru thinks of Russia. He thinks of a warm hand reaching for his own at the press conference in Moscow. He thinks of _The Nutcracker_, and how unfair it is that their shared midnight is coming to an end.

Yuzu thought he washed this grief all away at Pyeongchang. But that's not what ice does. It preserves. It remembers. Even the ugly parts.

He starts writing. A clean notebook, his favorite pen, the dictionary on his phone, and a few sentences in a language he'd fought for years to understand.

"When the Olympic Games was over, and this season began…"

This is tough. There is too much to condense into fifty seconds of ablution. A thousand days with a thousand steps each. A thousand messages through the gap of one rink, three countries, two oceans. His crown, Javi's crown. Holding the mic at a gala and trying not to flub an introduction he memorized on the plane ride to Barcelona. Broken skin, broken boots, breaking down before medal ceremonies. Everything they lost and won.

This is how they conquered. This is how they lived. This is their story, but it is not a story, because everything is kept secret by the ice, their kingdom and theirs alone.

"I know you're not coming back…"

A smile is a jar that traps everything inside except where it cracks. He fights down the lump in his throat. The last thing he wants is for Javi to be in tears before his performance.

"…I remember how I used to think the quad Sal hates me…"

Scratch that. Javi already knows this. The _world_ knows this. Rewrite.

"Thank you for allowing me to come to Toronto," he says instead. He goes on, and it's like clawing apart the sun with bare fingers.

He doesn't say, _I'll never forget you_, because that goes unspoken. He says_, I'll respect you_, because his father told him respect is the greatest thing you can give, and Javier Fernandez deserves nothing but the best.

The video comes out soon after Javi shows up at official practice. Brian's face on the screen is the fondest it's ever been since the Olympics. And Yuzu's is utterly solemn. There was a little bit of grief there, but no tears, and maybe that was good enough.

_"I hope I can share the ice with you one more time,"_ says Michal Brezina.

This is where his breath hitches. There's always been one more time, one more year, one more season. Now the doors are closing, and he sees it for what it is— what all of it really is— what Javi has always tried to tell him:

_Memories_. That is all it has ever been from start to end. Figures left on the ice that disappear before the day is over. Doing it again and again so no one could forget. Cameras, because someone might. He snorts because he already knew this a long time ago, but keeps forgetting, relearning, and forgetting again. He will never finish saying goodbye, because their story will never finish. The hugs will go on. And the clapping, the cheering, the teasing, the high-fives. He knows that in twenty years he will still be able to recite the lyrics of Spain's national anthem by heart.

The last shot is of _The Man Who Dared to Dream_ waving to the crowd. The crowd roars back, and Yuzu sees the skies of his dream cities falling together.

* * *

You can never know how big a role someone plays in your life until they leave. This he realizes at Autumn Classic, in the Grand Prix, at the Cricket Club in early January. It is different skating at your home rink when your favorite pair of red-and-gold-decorated blades is gone.

_No, not gone_. Javi will grow old, and so will Yuzu, and joints will creak and skin grow pale with the weight of the years.

But today is theirs.

"Yuuusu!" is all the warning he gets before his teammate, forever his teammate, forever, grabs his waist and tries— really, what kind of attempt was that—to lift him up. (And fails.)

Jun Hwan is laughing, laughing, laughing. Jason grabs his hand and spins him around.

In another world, Javi goes on forever. In another world, ankles don't shred themselves and knees don't falter and they lay down on the ice together after a long and tiring practice session. They fight over colors — maybe crayons now, maybe team jackets. Javi still brings his coffee five minutes late while Yuzu is slinging axel after axel after axel. Together, knight and onmyouji, guardians of hexagonal raindrops and Pooh bears. There will forever be a star-filled space in his heart for his beloved Don Javier.

_We will always have the ice, Javi. Even when it melts and I can't bend down to scoop up snow and your boots don't hold you up anymore and we can't land a single loop without falling on our butts. We will always have the ice._

_Eien ni._

_Siempre._

* * *

During the men's victory ceremony at the 2019 European Championships, Javier Fernandez stands on top of the podium for the last time in his career. His smile is sad and brilliant and universally missed.

Especially by Team Cricket.

Before he leaves, Yuzuru sets a little paper crane under the Spanish flag. It is not red; nothing about it connotes spider lilies anymore. Sweat from his fingers has caused the dye to fade to blotches of pink and off-white.

_Cherry blossoms._

"Thank you, Javi," he whispers, patting the ice softly. It is cold as ever.

But his hands are warm.


End file.
